Many birds will use whatever they can get their beaks on to construct their nests — including cigarette butts. Now, new research suggests that there might be a side benefit to using discarded cigarettes for nest materials: it seems to keep the bugs out.

Bed bugs are a major cause of paranoia, and the mere suggestion of an infestation can lead to mass panic. But with all the scientific tools at our disposal, we ought to be able to figure out how these things work, and stop them from infesting our homes and us miserable. Right? And now, luckily, there's been a major step forward.

We've all heard tales of elderly friends and relatives who have fallen for financial scams. Pyramid schemes, Nigerian emails, dodgy "computer repair" calls, you name it. That said, there may be a reason for it — a scientific explanation for how we get scammed more easily the older we get.

Antarctica's Lake Vida has been sealed beneath the ice for 2,800 years. Its depths have become a concentrated briny brew, freezing cold, and shrouded completely in darkness. And now, researchers have just shown that it has a thriving bacterial ecosystem.

Figuring out when humans first arrived in a location is surprisingly tricky. Sometimes, you find a nice chunk of pottery or something, but oftentimes artifacts aren't as easy to find. Predators can leave bones that look a lot like ones that a human might butcher, and a natural fire leaves coal much the same as a human one does. So what do humans leave behind everywhere that's unique to them? Poop. Well, human poop, anyway.

The complex computer models we use to predict the weather be used to predict illness, too. According to a new paper, these models could help us know weeks in advance just how bad this flu season will be.

As any steampunk will gleefully tell you, the Victorian era was a period of incredible discovery, where scientific breakthroughs occurred at an astonishing rate. Which was the perfect environment for a book like Scientific Amusements to be published - a hodgepodge of science, illusion, party tricks, naturalism, and more under a single banner.

Wormholes — made by actual worms in wood, not gravitational forces in space — are a key to the past. These holes are where beetles lay their young, in trees, furniture, and even great works of art.. And now scientists say the wormholes in ancient paintings reveal the movements of insect species hundreds of years ago.

While they're perhaps less likely to take up paragliding or get an ill-advised tattoo, it appears that other primates suffer from midlife crises just like Homo sapiens. A new study of chimps and orangutans found that they have a major dip in well-being during their middle years.

As a kid, having older siblings is either wonderful or horrible, depending on the day of the week, phase of the moon, or what stage of puberty they're going through. But over the course of your lifespan, are they generally a force for good or evil? Well, if you look at the data, it's a bit of both.

We already have white noise, and now there an equivalent for smell. Scientists in Israel believe they've identified "olfactory white", a blend of dozens of components that smells — well — totally neutral.

Well, it wasn't humans exactly. Probably our Homo heidelbergensis ancestors lashed the first sharpened rock to a large wooden pole. It looks like yet another technological milestone has been pushed back even further into the past, as new research suggests that early humans were making hafted spears and knives an incredible 500,000 years ago.

While humans might not be making too much noise in the oceans, above ground it's a whole different story. In fact, even insects are having to adapt to the huge amount of noise pollution created by humans — grasshoppers are having to up the volume to be heard over traffic.

Look, I'm all for biodiversity, but 750 legs? That's too damned many. First discovered in 1926, lllacme plenipes was thought lost until it was spotted again in 2006. Now this millipede has been fully described in the open access journal ZooKeys, and suffice to say, the prospect of 375 pairs of legs gives me the heebie jeebies.

Stents have long been used in medicine for keeping blocked arteries open, along with various other tubes of the body that are prone to blockage and collapse. Now, this same concept has been shrunk down to a minute size, and might soon be finding a home in your eyeballs.

Much ink has been spilled over the rise of allergies over the last few decades, and one of the most popular theories is that it's due to children not being exposed to enough germs. A new piece of research seems to support that theory, tying the incidence of the dreaded peanut allergy to people's socioeconomic status.

]]>healthmedicinebiologyscienceallergiespeanutssciFri, 9 Nov 2012 19:05:52 GMT5958181http://io9.com/5958174/will-2040-be-the-year-of-the-allergy-apocalypseClimate change could mean that your allergies are about to go into overdrive. A new study suggests that by 2040, pollen counts will have doubled — that's a hell of a lot of sneezing and scratchy eyes headed our way.

]]>environmenthealthmedicinebiologyallergiesclimate changeglobal warmingsciencesciFri, 9 Nov 2012 15:00:00 GMT5958174http://io9.com/5958297/our-brains-can-make-fast-decisions-and-accurate-decisions----but-not-at-the-same-timeWhen it comes to making decisions on the fly, we sacrifice accuracy for speed. It's true for humans, and it's true for most other species — rapid fire answers are less likely to be correct. Called the speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT), and while we know it's a thing, the scientific basis for it has been poorly understood. However, a new paper is claiming to have unlocked how the brain handles this — and it's turning the traditional model on its head.

One of the big downfalls of the pacemaker (apart from their newly discovered vulnerability to hacking) is that every couple of years you have to open up a person again in order to install a new set of batteries. So why not tap the body to power this device directly?

A tomato genetically modified to produce a certain peptide has managed to do a pretty good job of lower plaque build up in the arteries of mice — so one day, you could help your heart simply popping down some produce.